


Possessions

by Theoroark



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-20
Updated: 2019-07-20
Packaged: 2020-07-09 09:08:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19885132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Theoroark/pseuds/Theoroark
Summary: Gabriel is an angel, Jack is a demon. They're both not where they're supposed to be.





	Possessions

**Author's Note:**

  * For [svntysix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/svntysix/gifts).



Gabriel explains the process in great detail to every soul whose body he borrows. He explains that an angel needs a physical form to affect change on Earth. He promises he will return their body to them, no matter what, and that he will only use it for the task he’s telling them about. He can’t offer them money or treasure or any reward but the knowledge that the world is a little less sick. He doesn’t take the body until he’s sure the soul understands and is willing. After all, good deed can’t be built off bodies he steals and uses like toys. 

It’s odd at first, walking around as a human after all these years. He has to reacquaint himself with pain, with sneezing, with crowds. He’s never wholly human, though. He keeps his angel’s eyes. And that’s how he sees the demon. 

No human would notice him, of course. They’ve probably seen this man a thousand times. He’s probably their friend. But Gabriel sees the unnaturally blue eyes beneath the man’s brown ones. And he can smell the sulfur and seawater around him. Gabriel knows that this is a possession, and that the being possessing is not one of his kind. 

The demon recognizes him instantly as well. The blue eyes widen, and then, in an instant, are gone. The brown-eyed man crumples to the ground. Gabriel watches as a man on a scooter and a woman doing her shopping stop and rush over to him. When he’s sure the man is well, then he continues on the job he took this body for, ignoring the pit in his borrowed stomach. 

The demon doesn’t reappear, that excursion. But the next time Gabriel sees him, he doesn’t run. The demon stops what it’s doing and watches Gabriel quietly. 

He’s being challenged, he realizes quite quickly. The demon doesn’t know who he is. Maybe Gabriel’s an archangel, a righteous and powerful being come to earth to smite the evil that creeps to its surface. Or maybe Gabriel’s nothing to fear, just some angel who steals out of heaven and makes bargains with humans he’s probably not wholly authorized to make. 

Gabriel doesn’t smite him where he stands. And so the demon knows. He smiles widely, and saunters towards him. Gabriel briskly walks away. He borrowed this body for a reason. He needs to achieve that reason, and only that reason. He doesn’t want to break the deal he made with the soul. He doesn’t want to be distracted. 

“You picked a good host,” the demon says, as he falls into step beside Gabriel. Gabriel grits his teeth. 

“This was who agreed to lend me their body,” he says. He glares at the demon’s form. It’s a middle aged man, little bit of a pot belly, his nice clothes blending in at the courthouse Gabriel’s operating in now. Gabriel doesn’t know who this body was, but he knows the demon didn’t ask permission before he took control. 

He wonders if the soul is still there, trapped, watching Gabriel do nothing to save it. 

“That was nice of them,” the demon says, just as chipper as ever. He stops, and Gabriel stops too. The demon holds out his hand. “I’m Jack,” he says. 

Gabriel stares at the hand, then up at the stolen face, and the blue eyes watching him. “What are you doing?” he asks. 

Jack shrugs. “If we’re going to be working in the same town, why shouldn’t we get to know each other? I don’t get to meet one of us very often.”

“There is no us,” Gabriel spits. Jack just laughs. 

“You may not be like me. But both of us, we’re not them. So.” He waves a hand. “Just thought I would introduce myself. You never know where you might find a friend.”

And then he leaves the body, and it crumples to the ground in front of Gabriel. Gabriel sits with him, and waits until doctors come and the man’s eyes open before he leaves. 

The next time Gabriel returns to earth, he realizes he must be leaving some trail, sending out some signal. Because as he’s walking down a busy street, he hears a commotion behind him. And when he turns to look, he sees a man with unnaturally blue eyes pushing his way through the crowd towards him. 

“What are you even doing here,” Gabriel asks flatly, when Jack’s standing in front of him. Jack grins. 

“And hello to you too!”

“I come down here to right wrongs. I ask permission from every body I borrow, and I always return them to their souls.”

“I leave souls where I found them,” Jack points out. Gabriel raises an eyebrow. 

“I’m sure they’re very grateful.”

“Come on now,” Jack says. He starts walking down the street and despite himself, Gabriel follows. “We might go about things a bit differently. I might have to tune out a bit more whining than you do. But we’re both here for the same reason, aren’t we?”

“And what would that be?”

Jack stops. They’re in front of a little coffee shop now, a locally owned one, and Gabriel registers that his body is tired, and would quite like to go inside, almost as much as he wants to hear Jack’s answer. 

“We both didn’t do enough, while we were here,” Jack says. “And so we’re making up for lost time.”

Gabriel could argue with that. He can only imagine what Jack is doing with his stolen bodies– hedonistic escapades that he thinks he’s entitled to. Gabriel uses these bodies to do good things. To make the world better. 

But that’s the thing, isn’t it. Gabriel does these because he knows when he was alive, he didn’t do enough of that. He sat in heaven for millennia judging humans for ruining the world. Then he had remembered that he had not given them a particularly healed one, and he was doing nothing to aide them now. So he had come down to earth. 

Maybe in sentiment, they were different, but Gabriel could not honestly say that Jack was wrong. 

He turned and walked silently into the coffee shop. Jack followed him, and Gabriel bought him a latte. 

-

Gabriel didn’t argue with Jack when he approached him, after that. It made more sense on a number of fronts. There was his vague guilt at his own hypocrisy, sure. But there was also the fact that accepting Jack was a much less fraught process, it involved far less evasion or debating or Jack abruptly leaving his host for Gabriel to care for as they came back to themselves. 

And Jack wasn’t bad company. Some of the work Gabriel did was tedious. Working his way through a maze of bureaucracy to free the unjustly imprisoned, or cleaning the house of someone to infirm to do it themselves. Jack would talk to him throughout the day. Would sit there, decidedly not helping, and poke fun at the people around them, and grin triumphantly when he eventually made Gabriel laugh. 

“Why are you here?” Gabriel asked him one day. Because Gabriel saw the benefit of Jack’s company for himself well enough, but couldn’t tell what was in it for Jack. And he doubted that was why Jack was hanging around him.

Jack tilted his head. “On Earth, you mean?”

“No, with me.”

Jack looks down at the dirt and leaves he’s standing on. They’re in a forest. Gabe is spreading the ashes of someone he never knew. It’s silent and awkward. 

“You’re fun to talk to,” Jack says. “You’re interesting.”

“Interesting,” Gabriel repeats, and Jack nods. 

“I don’t see angels, except when they’re hunting us. You’re the first angel I’ve seen take an interest in helping humans. You’re the first angel I’ve seen care more about that than about killing me. That’s interesting.”

The last of the ashes leaves Gabriel’s hand. He says a prayer under his breath. He can hear Jack waiting behind him, impatiently, for him to respond. 

“Do you want to help people?” Gabriel asks Jack, when he’s finished. “Is that why you’re with me?”

“Of course not. I told you. You’re just interesting, that’s all.”

Nothing in Jack’s tone or expression indicates that he’s lying, but Gabriel is still thoroughly unsatisfied with his answer. He grinds his teeth. “Why are you here, then? On Earth?”

Jack is silent for a moment. Then he walks away, dead leaves crunching under his feet. Gabriel stares after him. He’s too confused and upset to call out to him or follow, but as he’s returning the body he borrowed to its owner, he realizes what Jack did. He didn’t bolt, leaving Gabriel to tend to his shocked host. He walked away. 

Gabriel thinks about that. He should thank Jack for that. But Jack doesn’t find him the next time he comes to Earth, or the time after that. Gabriel carries out his tasks quietly and alone. He had forgotten how lonely it was, without Jack. 

He makes it clear to souls what he’s going to do with their bodies. He doesn’t want to cheapen the gift they’re giving him. But soon, the anxiety he feels around Jack becomes too much. He finds the soul of an old man. He tells him that he’s not asking for his body to do a good deed. He’s asking for it so he can do something utterly self-serving, something morally neutral at best. Gabriel cannot offer him anything. 

The man gives him his body, and Gabriel wakes in his faded recliner, watching the news. HE steps out the front door of the man’s house, looks up at the sky, and opens all of his eyes. He sees the blue light, maybe a few miles away, and he starts towards it. 

Jack is old too, when Gabriel finds him. Almost stereotypically so. He’s sitting hunched over on a park bench. He must sense Gabriel coming, because he doesn’t react as Gabriel sits next to him. 

“I missed you,” Gabriel says. Jack blinks a few times but says nothing. “I don’t know what exactly you’re upset about, but…”

“You’re not sorry,” Jack finishes, when it’s clear Gabriel can’t. 

“I could be, if I knew what to be sorry for.”

“Nothing,” Jack says. He runs his fingers through his hair. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I shouldn’t be upset.”

“But you are,” Gabriel says. Jack nods. “Are you going to tell me why?”

Jack looks away and says nothing. “I did miss you,” Gabriel says quietly. “And I’d like to see you again. So I wish you would.”

And that works. Jack turns to him and says, “You have a good reason, for coming down here. My reason isn’t good, and it isn’t even a good kind of bad. It’s just… sad.”

“What is it?”

“You’re here because you don’t think you did enough good, when you were alive,” Jack says. “I’m here because I didn’t do enough, period. I let others run my life for me. I never made a decision, never took a risk, and so when I died, and I realized that was all there was– I couldn’t accept it. So I came back.”

They’re both quiet for a bit. Pigeons land near them, apparently having learned to associate old men on benches with breadcrumbs. Gabriel wishes absentmindedly that this soul was the kind who kept snacks in his pockets. 

“I’m not judging you,” Gabriel says finally. “I don’t think your reason is sad. I’m just… trying to figure out what to say.”

“Okay,” Jack says. 

“Because I came down here to do good, but when I was an angel– you said it yourself, I wasn’t doing anything there.”

“Alright.”

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

Jack gives him a sad smile. “If you were a demon, would you believe an angel saying they weren’t judging you?”

With his physical form, Gabriel sighs. With his true form, he reaches out to the soul that owns the body. “Tell your host you’re leaving,” Gabriel says. 

“What?”

And Gabriel leaves his physical body. With his angelic hand, he reaches out, and Jack stares at him with blue eyes and then takes it. As they rise above the park, Gabriel sees the two bodies jerk, but come to unharmed. He sighs in relief. 

This is the first time he’s really seeing Jack, he realizes. Jack’s form is quite human, but Gabriel feels like he’s looking at him through two inches of seawater, even though Jack’s right there. The only thing that isn’t distorted are his eyes, which are even brighter now. Anglerfish beacons on his body. 

Jack still looks more human than Gabriel does, though. Gabriel’s suddenly quite self conscious about the eyes blinking across his body, his extra pair of arms, the many sets of wings he’s trying not to subconsciously fold around himself. 

“Well,” Jack says. It’s odd to hear his real voice. There are notes in it that sound like crashing waves, or like heavy rain. “What are we here for?”

Gabriel puts a hand on his cheek, feels Jack’s skin waver, and kisses him. He tastes the salt water he had heard on Jack’s tongue, the damp atmosphere. He wonders what this is like for Jack, if Gabriel’s warmth is offputting to him, if Jack dislikes the feeling of candles or the taste of honey. He wonders if he should have done this on Earth, though he probably would be too embarrassed to tell a soul that that was why he wanted their body. 

When they break apart, Jack’s blue eyes are wide. “What was that?” he asks. 

“I told you,” Gabriel says. “I wasn’t judging you.”

Jack stares at him. Then he bursts out laughing, almost folding in on himself. “That’s how you were going to convince me? By kissing me?”

Gabriel folds his arms. “Did it work?”

Jack straightens up. “I am– glad,” he says, as he collects himself. “I thought this might be a one-sided thing and I am grateful it’s not. You can tell your soul you did your good deed.”

“I’m telling no one about this.”

Jack laughs again. He puts his hand on Gabriel’s waist and kisses his neck. Gabriel is very aware that if he were in a human body right now, he would be quite flushed. 

“My angel,” Jack says. “We have become entirely too much like them.”

“Not like them,” Gabriel says. “Like us.”

**Author's Note:**

> A birthday gift for Ash, @svntysix- please follow her and appreciate all her amazing Content today!!!
> 
> I wrote this based more off Jewish folklore than Christian demonology bc I don't know as much about the latter tbh. Fun fact the word for the beneficent possessing angel, _ibbur_ , literally means impregnation. This isn't that kind of fic though.
> 
> I'm [@tacticalgrandma](https://twitter.com/tacticalgrandma) on twitter if you want to talk to me there!
> 
> Thank you so much for reading, and any comments/kudos would mean the world <3


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